


Here Right Now

by lizzy_stardust_18



Category: Dear Evan Hansen - Pasek & Paul/Levenson
Genre: Evan Is Not Okay, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Suicide, The Author Uses Too Much Figurative Language: More At 11, actually it's more than implied and referenced but it's not graphic, after words fail, and she isn't ok either, basically Zoe finds Evan while he's havin a panic attack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-02
Updated: 2018-08-02
Packaged: 2019-06-20 11:07:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15532890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizzy_stardust_18/pseuds/lizzy_stardust_18
Summary: Having a panic attack on the immaculately scrubbed floor of a department store with a razor in his hand was not something Evan Hansen had planned to do that day, but what was life without a little spontaneity? He supposed it was fitting that he'd have an episode on the one day he'd decided to do something to break the monotony into which his life had descended. He’d learned that the days tend to drag on when you’ve irrevocably screwed up every good thing in your life.





	Here Right Now

Having a panic attack on the immaculately scrubbed floor of a department store with a razor in his hand was not something Evan Hansen had planned to do that day, but what was life without a little  _ spontaneity _ ? He supposed it was fitting that he'd have an episode on the one day he'd decided to do something to break the monotony into which his life had descended. He’d learned that the days tend to drag on when you’ve irrevocably screwed up every good thing in your life. 

Evan found this out in the last few weeks of school, during which time he’d floated from class to class, feeling like he’d prematurely become a ghost and was haunting his own flesh. 

 

For the first week after his falling out with the Murphys, he had been unable to stop crying for even a minute. The high of having his mother hold him and inspire him to live had quickly worn off once he had to return to school and there was no Zoe and no Jared and no Alana to greet him when he walked in, and he quickly descended into a constant stream of tears. He was like a sewer valve that got stuck and couldn’t be turned off. His teachers and classmates had simply chalked it up to grief, and he was able to slip away from class quite easily whenever he felt the tears coming on. His teachers always greeted him with the same agonizingly sympathetic expression, telling him gently that they were there if he needed anything. He wanted to run far away from them. He didn’t deserve their kindness, their sympathy. He deserved to rot in a hole with the rest of the awful, decaying things that had forgotten to die. He would have thought he’d have overstayed his welcome in terms of pretending to mourn for Connor Murphy by now, and it unnerved him to realize that people still patiently allowed him to reap the benefits of borrowed grief. If only they knew what Evan was  _ actually _ mourning, they’d be far more reticent about letting him sneak off to cry. 

 

However, the tears had soon been replaced by an empty, hollow feeling that was exacerbated by the fact that going to school made him feel like he was drowning behind a dam of secrets. Everywhere he looked, he saw evidence of what he’d done. Connor Project posters lined the walls, mocking him with their hollow sincerity, reminding him over and over again that he was too cowardly to fix this mess he’d made. Worse than that, however, was a picture of Connor sitting in the hallway in a giant glass case, next to the plaques and trophies given to football stars and volleyball champions. The picture was engraved “Rest In Peace Connor Murphy: A Great Student and Wonderful Friend.” Beneath the picture was a plaque commemorating the opening of the memorial orchard, but it mercifully left out the details of what happened to Connor.

 

Since Connor hadn’t made it to picture day senior year, the school had elected to use his sophomore yearbook picture. (They hadn’t used his picture from junior year because he was scowling at the camera.) In the picture they used, his hair only fell past his ears and he was actually smiling. There was still a small portion of baby fat on his face, which provided a stark contrast from the gaunt, skeletal Connor who had shoved Evan in the hallway. He was also wearing a tie, because the picture was taken back when Connor cared about how he looked in the yearbook. It was the same tie Evan had worn during his speech. The one Connor should have worn to bar mitzvahs. Evan wondered if they could have been a team had they known each other back then. Evan Hansen, the boy who only had one person come to his bar mitzvah because his mom “made him,” and Connor Murphy, the boy who didn’t get invited to any. Could they have been friends? Could seventh grade have been kinder to the both of them if they’d had each other? Connor had cultivated a reputation for being “scary” and “insane” by then, but Evan knew they’d been bullied by the same people. But while the bullying had made Evan sink into the shadows, it had forced Connor under a merciless microscope. At any given moment, the entire student body could have been judging Connor Murphy, and they frequently did. How cruel it was then, that the school that had so abused him thought it could just clean Connor up and make him into something he wasn’t so he’d look respectable in that glass case. To those who didn’t know who he was, it didn’t even look like he’d committed suicide. He didn’t look like a boy who’d threatened to kill his own sister. He didn’t look like a boy who was tortured every day by his own demons. He didn’t look like a boy they’d found passed out at the park, choking on his own vomit with his eyes rolled back in his head. He looked like a sweet boy who got swept up in some terrible tragedy. He didn’t look like he was the tragedy himself. 

 

_ Slow your roll there, Evan. Don’t start acting like you know me better than they do. You did the exact same thing to me. Cleaned me up and spat me out.  _ When his thoughts began to race like this, he often pictured Connor standing next to him, obnoxiously crunching an apple and calling him “buddy” and making disparaging comments about the principal. Sometimes he even heard Connor’s voice out loud. Which, come to think of it, was not something that sane people did. He didn’t have the heart to bring it up to anyone, though, in part because they would think he was crazy, but also because the selfish, small part of him that had convinced him to lie in the first place was telling him that he needed to hear Connor’s voice, if not as punishment then perhaps as company. And wasn’t  _ that _ a sad fucking thought. Evan had been having a lot of those lately, it seemed. 

 

He didn’t get much sleep at night anymore, either. Every night, when he’d try to go to bed, the shadows would creep in and his childhood fears of being eaten by a monster in the middle of the night would return. He’d lie awake, paranoid and jumping at every small sound, as if the creaking of the house signified his impending doom. But worse than the anxiety was the guilt. During the day, he could robotically go through the motions of school and come home on autopilot, but at night, when he was left with nothing but himself, the guilt crushed him like a boulder sitting on his chest. Every night he stayed up, sobbing so hard that he couldn’t breathe or staring numbly into the darkness. Sometimes he wrote letters trying to explain to the Murphys why he had done the things he had. Some nights he just got drunk. Some nights he sat for hours with his finger hovering over the “call” button on Zoe’s contact page. 

 

He never called. 

 

His mom had been trying to help him, and he was grateful for her, but she was still gone a significant portion of the day, and the frequent calls and texts he got from her did very little more than buzz in his ear like a wasp. They did nothing to fill up the giant empty space that was his day, but then again, ever since he’d lost the Murphys and Jared and Alana, nothing really could fill that void. He had no hobbies. Netflix wasn’t interesting. No one paid attention to his social media (they paid attention to the Connor Project page, but not him.) People in the hallways still talked to him and said hello, but they didn’t really know him, and their names and faces blurred around him in a kaleidoscope of acquaintances, easily forgotten in the doldrums of the day. He wondered if this was how Alana Beck felt all of the time. A nagging voice in his head told him he should have thought about how she felt long before then. He hoped it wasn’t too late to start, but it probably was. 

 

He tried to lift his spirits outwardly at least a little bit when his mom came home, for her sake, and they would spend the evenings that she had free sitting on the couch and eating takeout and watching TV. Evan treasured these evenings with his mom, and they managed to brighten his day a little, but they weren’t enough to sustain him. They were like a jar of fireflies in a pitch-black forest, and their dim glow couldn’t light the way for him, no matter how hard they tried. But he pretended that they could, for his mother’s sake. He couldn’t live with himself if he let his mother feel like a failure. He couldn’t really live with himself anyway, but that was beside the point.

 

Despite his veneer of relative okayness, his mother had noticed something was wrong with him, and so that day she’d sent him to the mall with $30 and an order to “actually have some fun, sweetie!” He didn’t have it in him to protest that the mall wouldn’t be any fun for him because he had a metric ton of anxiety and no friends to speak of, so he’d just nodded and put on a fake smile. His mother’s tired eyes had just been so full of a gut-wrenching mixture of hope and pity, and Evan realized just how ragged he had run her over the past few months. She looked permanently frayed at the edges, like the strings on the hem of one of his polos, but she still gave him her signature warm smiles that made his chest feel tight with guilt. She deserved more than her hollow, broken shell of a son whom she couldn’t fill with happiness because it all leaked out of him every time she tried.  _ No wonder she didn’t pick up the phone that day,  _ the Connor voice had whispered as he left the house. He didn’t have the will to disagree. 

 

So here he was, at the mall, wandering aimlessly from department store to department store. He couldn’t afford any of the things he’d really want in any of the big clothing stores, and nothing else really appealed to him, so he settled for buying himself an overpriced iced tea and walking down the length of the overly-air-conditioned mall, shivering a little and wiping the excess moisture from the cup on his pants. The mall wasn’t an unpleasant place to be, he decided, and while it did little to help with the crushing sadness, it cleared the fog from his head somewhat, which was nice. Eventually he ran out of iced tea, and he went to throw out the empty ice-filled cup when he froze, his hand paused over the trash can. In the distance he could see a familiar denim jacket on a girl with chestnut brown hair, standing enraptured in front of a bookcase. His heart sped up and he dropped the cup and immediately turned away just as she began to turn towards him. He didn’t bother to check to see if the girl in the distance was Zoe or not. Every second he spent looking even in Zoe Murphy’s direction was a violation of her at this point, and he wouldn’t cause her any more grief than he already had.

 

He turned in the opposite direction of the girl in the distance and walked as quickly as he could towards a men’s department store, pretending to be very deeply interested in a row of shaving products. He hoped Zoe hadn’t seen him. If she was out at the mall then she at least would have been trying to have a good time and she didn’t need Evan to ruin that for her. He let his eyes wander over the shelf and they landed on a row of razors. He picked up a straight-razor to examine it. The edges looked fairly sharp. If he nicked himself while shaving with it it could be fatal. Evan caught the faint scent of apple close to him and his stomach turned over.  _ Yep, using a razor would just about do it. It’s a pretty messy way to go, but hey, to each their own, right?  _ Evan immediately felt bile rising up his throat, but he didn’t put down the razor. 

 

It would be so simple. He wouldn’t have to exist like this anymore. Just one simple line down each forearm, and then the Murphys would be free of him. His mother could go to school without worrying about paying for his college tuition. And he could slip away into the shadows like he always knew he would. He was just a tiny spot on a giant map, and if he vanished, no one would bat an eye. Or maybe they would. Maybe Alana would work up the energy to start another kickstarter, this time in Evan’s name. It could be quite the sensation. The best friend of the dead kid couldn’t live without him for even a year. What a tragic story of friendship. Jared would probably get a kick out of the gay rumors that would spread from his death, that is, if he didn’t start them himself. And then there was Zoe. She probably would be fine with it if he was gone. He lied to her. He violated her trust in a monumental, unforgivable way. He couldn’t foresee her caring one way or the other if he lived or died. 

 

Evan took a step back, clutching the razor in his hand. It was less than $25. He could buy it, go home that night, and all of this would just...disappear. He wouldn’t hurt the Murphys anymore, he wouldn’t hold his mother back, and he wouldn’t have to live with this heaviness hanging over him anymore. He could make it all vanish. He could make himself vanish. And it would be the right thing to do, right? He deserved it after all of the things he’d done, it would be a correct course of action for him to take himself out of the world...right? 

 

The voice that had haunted his head for weeks now spoke aloud, despite the fact that there was no one else there. “ _ You really think it’s that easy? Hate to break it to you, buddy, but you can’t just get out of this shit. But hey, what do I know, do what you want. Kill yourself. Ruin your mom’s life. See if I care.”  _

 

All of a sudden, everything was just so much. The smell of the store began to overwhelm him and suddenly his clothing felt too tight and too baggy at once and every noise made him want to jump out of his skin. He felt his chest tightening painfully and his arm went numb and this was it, he was going to have a heart attack at seventeen because of a goddamn hallucination and he’d become nothing more than an outlier in a health statistic and his mom would have to pay for the funeral and  _ oh god he couldn’t breathe _ . He tried to focus on breathing the way he’d been directed to do by Dr. Sherman, but nothing was working. He felt his knees buckle and he sat down, gasping for air. He fisted his free hand that wasn’t holding a razor in his pant leg and put his head on his knees. His chest felt so taut that he thought it could snap at any moment. The pressure inside him was rising and rising and rising but it wouldn’t stop and it wouldn’t hit its peak and it wouldn’t release and  _ why couldn’t he breathe _ ? He squeezed his fists until he could feel his nails poking at his skin through his pant legs.  _ Help me,  _ he thought,  _ help me it hurts so much.  _ He felt hot tears well up in his eyes. He hadn’t been this helpless on the ground since...since...

 

“Breathe, Evan,” he dimly heard a familiar voice say. He felt hands hesitantly touching his. The feeling of someone else’s skin on his felt strangely foreign, as though he wasn’t in his body or as though he was feeling their hands through a glove. “Evan, Evan, you have to breathe.” He gasped for air, and the hands on his squeezed tightly. “Come on, babe, please breathe for me.” He slowly raised his head, not daring to believe it. There she was, kneeling in front of him in her floral skirt and denim jacket, squeezing his hands like a lifeline. Zoe Murphy, the girl he’d lied to. The girl he’d hurt irreparably. The girl he loved more than anything in the world. Her mouth was set in a hard line, and her eyes were cold and focused, as though she hadn’t even noticed the pet name she’d let slip from her mouth a second before, but her voice was soft and gentle as she addressed him. “Do you have your meds with you?” Evan shook his head. “Do you need them?” Evan shook his head again. 

 

“It-It’ll pass,” he said, his voice a raspy croak. “I don’t get these-these panic attacks often anymore I just.” He squeezed his hands into fists as another wave of panic crashed over him and she drew her hands away. His chest squeezed, and he fought to take a deep breath in. She hesitated for a moment and then leaned forward and wrapped her arms around him, squeezing him tight. Oh God. Zoe had remembered that the best way to calm Evan down from a panic attack was to hug him, as she had had to do multiple times over the course of a relationship. He felt fresh tears forming in his eyes. He didn’t deserve this. He didn’t deserve her kindness. After all he’d done to her, she should leave him to rot. But she didn’t seem like she was going anywhere, so Evan let himself fall a little bit into her touch, quiet, interrupted sobs wracking his form. 

 

“Count with me,” Zoe said, “breathe in, come on.” He breathed as directed, albeit with some difficulty. “1...2...3...4...5…” He counted along with her in his head and then exhaled out for five beats again. She began the counting again, and he followed along with her, focusing on nothing but the simple act of breathing. She began to rub circles into his back with her hands, using just enough pressure to ground him, and Evan felt a rush of gratitude for her. It could have been seconds or it could have been minutes or it could have been hours before the world settled back into balance and his chest finally released, but eventually he managed to regain control of his breathing. She pulled away slightly and withdrew her arms. His back immediately felt cold without her touch, and he looked up at her hesitantly, still not sure if she was real, still not sure if she had willingly touched him for that long. 

 

“You okay?” she asked him. He nodded, and her hands dropped to her lap. She fiddled them nervously, looking down at her fingers and chewing on her bottom lip. She caught sight of what Evan was holding and reached out for his hand. He instinctively tightened his fist around the razor, but she turned his arm over and unfurled his fingers, gently plucking the razor from his hand. “Evan, why do you have this?” 

 

“I um, I needed more-more shaving supplies. I’m...getting a little fuzzy.” He gestured towards his nonexistent stubble. She pursed her lips. 

 

“Are you lying to me?” She said. Her words gutted him. Yet again, Zoe saw him, only this time she wasn’t seeing the good parts of him. She was seeing him at his most pathetic, his most vulnerable. The charitable thing for her to do would be to step on him and crush him like the bug he was, but instead she was just...here. Looking at him. Holding his razor like it was evidence from a crime he had to commit. The word “no” couldn’t come out of his mouth. It was stuck in there like a lightbulb, too big to take out. His silence apparently said everything he needed to. He ducked his head down to the floor in shame, avoiding her gaze. She spoke again, and this time her voice was angry rather than gentle. “You shouldn’t lie to me. You’ve done enough of that.” 

 

Evan looked up at her then, tears brimming in his eyes. He clearly wasn’t the only one. Her lip was trembling, and he shakily tried to speak, to defend himself, but it was like someone had turned his volume down low, so low that no one could hear him even when he screamed. He finally managed to choke out a phrase. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice sounding oddly muffled. “I just thought after all I’ve done I--” he swallowed thickly. “That there’s no way to make it right. So I...” he gestured weakly to the razor.  

 

“So you  _ what _ , Evan?” Her tone was hard. 

 

“Don’t make me say it,” he pleaded. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I just...you know how terrible I am. How fucked up what I did was. I just don’t see how I can--” he choked on a sob. “How I can ever make it better. How I can live with it. I can’t, Zoe, I can’t live with it. I’m sick of living like this and being like this and hurting everyone I’m done I’m just done.” The words poured out of him like ink, like taps on a keyboard typing a letter no one meant to see. “I’m just, I’m awful, Zoe, and I’m sorry.” 

 

Zoe regarded him for a long, watery moment before angrily swiping at her eyes. “God, Evan,” she said. “Why can’t you just hate yourself a normal amount? By all means, feel like a douchebag for what you did to us but not like,” she gestured with his razor, “not like this. You--” she shrugged helplessly, looking at him like he was a book she was desperately rifling through, like he could give her a different answer if she kept looking. She fell silent again. 

 

“I’m sorry,” was all he could manage to say. There was nothing else he was capable of saying to her. He was a walking apology, nothing more. 

 

“Evan?” she said, her voice far too soft. She was fiddling with the razor and biting her lip and Evan was certain he wasn’t prepared for what she was going to say next. “That letter. You said it was yours.” Evan’s stomach fell through the floor. “Why did you um, why did you write that? Everyone thought it was Connor’s note, how he was feeling but it was how you felt. Why did you--why were you printing out a suicide note, Evan?” 

 

He opened his mouth to protest, say that it wasn’t a suicide note, but who was he kidding? Hadn’t he lied enough? He closed his mouth again and twiddled his thumbs in his lap and looking up at Zoe. “When I broke my arm last summer,” he said, “I um. It wasn’t an accident. And then I got to school and I felt completely alone, and I just,” he gestured uselessly with his hands. “I’m sorry. I wish I’d never printed it. Maybe then--” he cut himself off. There was no going back from that train of thought once he started it. 

 

“You were really feeling that bad?” Zoe said, and the hurt look in her eyes was enough to make Evan feel like his chest was broken clean in half. He wanted to say no, no he was fine, anything to keep Zoe from looking at him like that. But he couldn’t lie to her. He couldn’t. So he just nodded. “I’m sorry. I didnt-I had no idea.” She sniffled. 

 

“You didn’t know me back then,” Evan protested. 

 

“Did I  _ ever _ know you, Evan?” Zoe said, and he knew the words should hurt, but the gentle way she said them made him feel more than guilt, more than shame. She didn’t say it like she was accusing him of lying. She said it sadly, like she was asking him if he’d eaten the last of her ice cream or if he’d remembered her birthday or if her brother had loved her. He hung his head. He didn’t know what to say. They sat there suspended in a long, torturous silence before Zoe spoke again.

 

“Evan...in your letter you um. You wrote that line about me.” She blinked and looked up at the ceiling, and her eyes sparkled with unshed tears. “‘Because there’s Zoe.’” She gave a short little laugh. “Why did you write that?” 

 

Evan opened his mouth, closed it again, and then licked his lips before speaking. “Because you were my hope, Zoe. I’d see you every day in the halls, laughing at something or being kind to someone and-and like at school dances you’d always be the first one on the floor you were so  _ vibrant _ , and I always--like I heard the way people would talk about-about Connor and then about you and you would be kind to people he’d hurt and you’d-you’d defend him when he got hurt and you were just so pretty and joyful and compassionate I thought if I could just talk to you, you know, this amazing girl I’d been in love with from afar for so long maybe I could. Maybe I could be okay.” 

 

There was another long silence in which Zoe sat there, chewing on her lip and twirling the razor over and over in her hands. “If we…” she puffed out her cheeks and looked up at him. “If we take you back will you--” she swiped at her eye again, wiping away the tears that threatened to spill over. “Will you promise not to hurt yourself?” 

 

Evan felt his stomach drop out and he almost recoiled in horror. “Zoe no,” he said, “Zoe don’t take me back. After what I did you-you can’t possibly want that.” 

 

“Well I don’t want you to  _ die _ !” Zoe was crying in earnest now. “Please, Evan,” she sobbed. “I can’t lose another person I love like that, I can’t.” She covered her face with her hands. “Not if I can stop it this time,” she said, her voice muffled as it came through her fingertips. The weight of her words sank into his skin and anchored him to the moment. His entire body was still, he couldn’t even nervously fidget. All he could do was stare at her, waiting for her to say something, for the other shoe to drop, for the exhale after the inhale. 

 

“It wasn’t your fault, Zoe, with him.” He gulped. “And-and it wouldn’t be your fault with-with me.” 

 

“Do you think that’s supposed to make me feel better?” she said. Her eyes were now red and puffy, and the look in her eyes was so hurt, like a baby bird on the sidewalk, trying to walk while dragging a broken wing. He just wanted to scoop her up and hold her, to put her back where she belonged, which was somewhere far far away from here on the ground with Evan. 

 

“It’s something,” he offered uselessly, staring down at the floor. It was his turn to bite his lip, wondering if he should ask her a question. “Zoe, um, why are you being so nice to me? After...all that, I thought I’d be dead to you.” 

 

“You were for a while. There were days that I couldn’t even acknowledge that you exist, that was how much it hurt. Jared came asking about you one day and I told him I didn’t fucking know or care how you were. And I don’t regret it because you ripped my entire life out from under me like a fucking tablecloth.” She gave him a hard, hurt stare. “In fact I’m only talking to you right now because I know the hell your mind puts you through.” Her finger twitched, as though maybe she wanted to reach out and caress the side of his face like she used to when she reassured him. Evan’s chest ached horribly. “I followed you over here when I spotted you because I wanted to--” she cut herself off and pursed her lips. “I just wanted to see your face,” she said in a small voice. “To make sure you were still here. Still real.” 

 

Her words broke another dam inside Evan, one he was unaware he had. Fresh tears welled up in his eyes and he let out a sob. He hid his face from her and covered his face with his hands. “I’m sorry, Zoe,” he wept pathetically, “I’m sorry. For everything.” There was nothing he could say for his actions, hell for his entire life besides “I’m sorry.” If he ever made a sound in this world, it would be a small apology, uttered in a small clearing in the woods where no one would be around to hear it. His body was wracked with sobs, and this time Zoe didn’t hold him close to her or ask him to breathe. She just sat there staring at him, waiting for him to finish with this sad, manipulative display of pain of which he deserved every bit. He hated breaking down in front of her. She was the last person on Earth who should have to clean up Evan’s broken shards, especially knowing how badly they had cut her the last time she touched him. 

 

“Evan,” she said, and he forced himself to look up at her. She didn’t look angry or hurt anymore, she just looked absolutely  _ broken _ . She reached out and grabbed his hands in both of her own, squeezing them tightly as if she could just will him to be better. It was a gesture he recognized from his mother. He felt sorry all over again that he couldn’t be better for either of them. He was just a series of repeated mistakes, a stagnant, cracked  _ thing _ that was forever confined to the shadows, unworthy to feel the sun’s rays on his face. “Can you promise me you won’t hurt yourself?” She wasn’t asking. She was begging him with her eyes to say yes. He  _ had _ to say yes. It would be his blessing, it would be the way he could set her free so she wouldn’t have to think about the way he was tipping over and spilling all over the immaculately cleaned linoleum department store floor. It would be the right thing to do to set Zoe Murphy free from this, free from  _ him _ . But he couldn’t do anything right at all. He couldn’t even do this one thing for her. He kept his silence, drumming lightly on his knee with his fingertips. He was done telling lies in the name of kindness. He owed Zoe Murphy the truth. 

 

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m sorry, Zoe, I don’t know.”

 

“Can I um,” she looked up at the ceiling and then around the store before looking back at him. “Can you get help? Is there someone you can talk to? Or can I um,” she sighed. “Can I take you to the hospital?” 

 

“You don’t have to do that,” he said, a little too quickly, because the thought of the medical bills that would come from a hospital stay made his stomach lurch. 

 

“I found you having a panic attack while holding a  _ razor _ , Evan. You need help.” She let out a deep sigh and then reached out to cup his face in both of her hands. “Look, I can’t be your friend or your girlfriend or your family member but,” she gulped, “I can be here right now.” She gently smoothed down his hair, closed her eyes, and pressed a hard, prolonged kiss to his forehead, as if everything that went unsaid between them could be conveyed in a single kiss. “You are something good that got wrapped up in a whole lot of bad, Evan.” She stroked his cheeks and pressed their foreheads together. “Remember that, please.” 

 

A fresh tear rolled down Evan’s cheek and she wiped it away. He nodded slightly. “Did you um--your friends, are they gonna be mad if you drive me somewhere?” 

 

She drew back and folded into herself slightly. “I didn’t come with friends,” she admitted. “I’m here alone. I drove here just to--” 

 

“--to get out of the house?” 

 

She nodded and gave him a tiny smile. “Yeah,” she said. It made his heart twist to know that Zoe was here alone, but it also made him feel just the tiniest bit better knowing that he wasn’t dragging her away from her friends. “So...can I drive you?” she said. He considered his options. It would be too expensive for him to go to the hospital. His mother would have to work even more shifts than she already did to pay them off. And he would probably get worse again anyway. But if he left Zoe here now, any sort of “I-won’t-hurt-myself” bravado he had would instantly fade and it would just be Evan and a bottle of pills or Evan and a razor or Evan and the highest branch of a tree. 

 

_ Hospital bills suck ass, but they’re a lot cheaper than a funeral. Take it from me,  _ the familiar voice in his head told him. He felt the weight on his shoulders sag and then roll off of him, leaving him dizzy and light-headed. He couldn’t go on like this anymore. He was tired of being in pain. He was tired of slogging through every day hating himself. He was tired of making his mother upset. And he was so tired of hurting Zoe Murphy. He looked up at her and nodded. 

 

She gave him a soft smile. She stood up and reached out her hand, very similarly to when she had first met him, and it was almost as though he was meeting her again for the first time as she offered him a hand up. Perhaps this could be the start of something new. Or perhaps it was a fluke and she’d never talk to him again. But all he knew was his hopes were pinned on Zoe yet again, and perhaps that was where they should stay. He took her hand and followed her out of the mall and into the sun. 


End file.
